The effect of resource munificence on worker motivation: Factors and resources that motivate community college admissions office recruiting

There may be many factors that motivate a worker to maintain or modify his/her behavior; and the mere presence of employee motivation is insufficient to ascertain whether worker behavior will enhance attainment of organizational goals. One factor that may influence worker motivation is resource munificence, defined as the level of generosity of commodities that enable the achievement of an objective. Thus, this research examined the question: Can resource munificence alter job behaviors?;Within the context of the admissions offices at U.S. community colleges, this research sought to answer whether the intervening variable of resource munificence moderated job behaviors associated with employees' self-efficacy or affective commitment.;To answer this question, admissions recruiters at community colleges and other two-year colleges, stratified geographically throughout the United States, were invited to participate in an online survey. The process resulted in 304 usable survey responses; a quantity sufficient to provide a 95% confidence level.;Utilizing correlation coefficients, survey results showed that self-efficacy, affective commitment, and job satisfaction are each positively associated with organizationally desirable job behaviors. These findings helped establish that the community college admissions environment is not all that dissimilar from other environments in which prior researchers have made similar linkages.;With evidence that this community college environment is not anomalous to other environments, a path analysis was conducted to assess the effect size of resource munificence on job behaviors. Utilizing a maximum likelihood estimate regression method, and the resource munificence motivation formula proposed by Klein (1990), it was demonstrated that the effect of resource munificence on organizationally desirable job behaviors associated with self-efficacy and affective commitment is small and statistically insignificant. Organizationally desirable behaviors do not appear to be moderated by resource munificence in the community college admissions recruiting context.;This research did not confirm that resource munificence altered employee behavior. But these results help uncover issues and contexts beyond the community college that can be further explored so that managers in other occupations may better understand and deploy resources that help enhance employees' behaviors in a manner consistent with the expectations of their organization.